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15 November 2013

The
Book of Me Written By Me is more pathetic than ever. The bloom is off
the rose. My fault entirely, of course: lack of commitment, a
preference to pick and choose, too many eclectic pursuits, creative
excuses like I have to clean my kitchen or my hard drive crashed, and so on. Maybe I can hustle
into combining the missing ...

Diaries
and Journals (Prompt 6) are something I gave up on —
apart from travel journals and boring attempts to track
medical-health issues —
because Facebook appeared and it has a lot of leniency for recording
the important, exhausting trivia of daily life. My Latvian
Grandparents (Prompt 7) have been written into posts on
this blog; my Scots-descended Grandparents whom I never
knew personally are admittedly a bit neglected. No-one has yet
pressed me to hear about Will's gentle decline into depression after
his brother got run over by a train, a brother who may or may not
have ruined the family business.

A
Time Capsule (Prompt 8)is simply not big enough to hold
(I should say choose) a few treasures or cryptic artifacts. A memo
attached to my will that lists the family heirlooms (few) and
personal treasures (many) including provenance for all is quite
enough to gobsmack my kids. Halloween (Prompt 9) and
sticky little children I avoid at all costs but do pay due respect to
All Saints Day and All Souls Day.

Can't
recall offhand any Unexplained Memories (Prompt 10) but
would this count? An old recurring dream about being shot in the
spine has since been replaced by being lost in a huge hotel —
make of that what you will, Dr. Freud.

Good!
That moves us right along to Military (Prompt 11). And
like many Geneabloggers, I did a post for the eleventh day of the
eleventh month. In fact it's sitting right below this one. In my
families, there's a certain dearth of eligible ancestors and
collaterals in the military category. Why? —
there we go, another adjunct idea to mess around with.

In
future, applying myself better would be worthy of all those others who are
creating such interesting posts.

The Desert Life, June 2013

Now,
faithful reader, you will find a hiatus here until the festive season
is truly cranked up to Code Green levels. I'm just taking my fest a
bit early and away.

07 November 2013

A German, if asked, might know
Holzminden as a pretty little town on the Weser River in Lower
Saxony. The name might have an entirely different context for an
Englishman, an Australian, a Canadian, and others. Today's town seems
to function without conscious memory of its own history a "mere"
century ago.

From Neil Hanson's Escape from Germany

Ninety-five years ago my father Lt.
Hector Dougall and his colleagues in Holzminden Prisoner of War (POW)
Camp received the news of Armistice Day (more on Hector's escapades
here). The camp inmates in 1917-1918 were captured Allied officers
with some enlisted men as orderlies. In 2013 when we asked a few
residents of the town about the old camp buildings and their First
World War role, they were bewildered; shared memory seemed barely to
encompass the Second World War. The daring (and later celebrated)
wartime escape of 1918 in their midst was not on their radar.

The buildings housing the prisoners
were constructed as army barracks in
1913 and still exist today, above the town, as part of a German
military base. Holzminden was deemed a punishment camp for
rebellious prisoners, repetitively described as the "most
notorious" of First World War prison camps ―
the German Black Hole, as
Hanson mentions.[1]
Its notoriety was due to the strictest of controls and the reputation
of the bullying, brutal, temperamental Kommandant: Hauptmann Karl
Niemeyer.

Courtesy of contributor to The Real Great Escape, Michael Melching's website: www.holzminden-camp.com/

The camp conditions may pale in view of
later conflicts, but this was probably the last great war of
traditional military manners when officers of opposing forces gave
due respect to rank.[2]
However, Niemeyer flouted the Hague Conventions, treating the men
contemptuously as criminals, verbally and physically. Escape attempts
were punished with solitary confinement for arbitrary, long periods,
disgustingfood
rations, and denial of medical aid. Real or perceived
infractions incurred deprivation and standing for hours in freezing
weather. Red Cross parcels and packages from home were pilfered or
even withheld. Sometimes Niemeyer ordered the guards to shoot
randomly into the prisoners' quarters. The facilities were sorely
inadequate for the numbers of incarcerated, so prisoners were usually
cold and hungry; by all accounts,
there was never enough food and much of what there was, was inedible.
In winter, six hundred men shared three stoves for heat.[3]

Judging from their personal diary
excerpts, the prisoners for the most part exhibited the plucky, stiff
upper lip syndrome and a sense of humour in foul conditions. They
mocked and defied Niemeyer whenever possible. Under his very nose the
men of Kaserne B dug their incredible escape tunnel. The epic project
was well-documented by a participant: the meticulous planning; the
inventive details; the coordination; the patience; the courage.[4]Twenty-nine men escaped before the tunnel
collapsed, leaving a disappointed waiting lineup and the rest of the
camp to face Niemeyer's apoplectic, vindictive anger. Eventually
nineteen men were recaptured
in a great manhunt effort. They were held in
solitary confinement until a court-martial was arranged; fortunately
the turning tide of war prevented enforcement of their sentencing.

Wikimedia Commons

Niemeyer
has been widely demonized as a dangerous, self-aggrandizing buffoon.
His own guards feared and despised him to the extent that some collaborated with the prisoners. When word of the Armistice came, he
disappeared; some say he donned a disguise to avoid facing Allied
troops. That last month of November into December, the guards also
trickled away to be replaced by German soldiers. Both captors and
prisoners were ill at ease as political turmoil reigned among the
defeated population. Lack of food was an even
more serious issue for everyone, including civilians. Time seemed to
drag on forever for the weary POWs whose collective expectation of
repatriation was dashed several times in the general confusion and
logistics failures. It took another month until a train was finally
arranged to transfer the men from Holzminden to the Dutch border. As
if in a dream come true, hundreds of weakened servicemen were
proceeding back to "Blighty." Niemeyer's later
whereabouts are unknown: myths arose about "sightings" to
feed the fantasies of would-be bounty hunters.

Holzminden today, courtesy Michael Melching: www.holzminden-camp.com/

Maybe we are all guilty of
collective memory deficit. As the twentieth century rolled on, the
evolution of broadcast media and film created modern, indelible
wartime images in the public eye. The
Second World War and further conflicts became more immediate and
visual. Most of us remember Steve McQueen in the movie "The
Great Escape," right? And so the
original Great Escape was eclipsed.

But now the exciting, gratifying news. The
lengthy project called Faces of Holzminden has
identified over 500 Allied war prisoners who were "guests"
in that camp. This month it gave birth to the Random House
(Australia) publication The Real Great Escape (see
also the dedicated Facebook page).[4]I rather regret the new title ―
it lacks the emotional pull for those of us descendants
heavily involved with author Jacqueline Cook ―
but marketing wisdom
prevailed. Publication coincides with world-wide First World War
commemorations.

The
tunnel story has been told before. Half the book dwells on it while
the rest pays attention to the flesh-and-blood men. To my mind, what
distinguishes The Real
Great Escape is the
generous usage of many prisoners' personal wartime diaries, most of
them shared for the first time in public. Daily life in the camp
becomes real
through their comments, reactions, and struggles. Thanks to the
warmly extended interest of Cook and her colleagues, we
descendants became a cohesive resource group. It was especially
rewarding to make contact with grandchildren of the man whose life
Hector once saved.

Hector was
not involved in the tunnel operation; due to previous escape attempts
he was originally assigned to long
weeks of solitary confinement in the wretched basement cells of
Kaserne A. He came home to Canada in 1919 clutching the
enormous flag he had jubilantly "liberated" after a crazy
climb up the camp flagpole. Some of his diary thoughts appear in The
Real Great Escape.

Like all the soldiers, sailors, and
airmen who preceded and followed them, these were once lively young
men whose war experience would remain with them and affect them to
different degrees throughout their futures. We lost a great many of
them.

03 November 2013

One of those chance things you come
upon that distract you far away in time and place.

A meteor storm was seen by two
awestruck young children of Adam Spencer UE, on the Niagara Peninsula
in 1799:

"The shower of stars that was
visible in North and South America November 13, 1799 was
witnessed by them. Their fire, which at that time was always kept
alive in the fireplace of the homes, by banking up at night, had gone
out, and two of the children were sent in the early morning hours to
a neighbour for coals. This was not an uncommon occurrence in those
days as there were no matches, fire could only be obtained by flint.
My grandmother then a very little girl and an older brother, together
witnessed the beautiful sight. She said the stars fell thick like
rain until a few feet from the ground and then disappeared. The
beauty of it was beyond description, though awe inspiring the
children were not afraid, but many of the people in the neighbourhood
were panic stricken, thinking that the end of the world had come, or
was near."(1)

The
spectacular sight the night before was apparently the first record
of a meteor shower, probably because astronomer Andrew E. Douglass
reported the same event from a ship near the Florida Keys:

"the
whole heaven appeared as if illuminated with sky rockets, flying in
an infinity of directions, and I was in constant expectation of some
of them falling on the vessel. They continued until put out by the
light of the sun after day break."(2)

Also
according
to This
Day in History:

The
Leonids meteor shower is an annual event that is greatly enhanced
every 33 years or so by the appearance of the comet Tempel-Tuttle.
When the comet returns, the Leonids can produce rates of up to
several thousand meteors per hour that can light up the sky on a
clear night. Douglass witnessed one such manifestation of the Leonids
shower, and the subsequent return of the comet Tempel-Tuttle in 1833
is credited as inspiring the first organized study of meteor
astronomy.

Meteorologist
Joe Rao says:

"Other
accounts were brought to light of a shower of thousands of bright
meteors on November 12, 1799, described by the Prussian scientist and
explorer Alexander von Humboldt from his camp in Cumanã, Venezuela.
In his words, there was 'no part of the sky so large as twice the
Moon's diameter not filled each instant by meteors.' An observer in
Florida that same night noted that the meteors were 'at any one
instant as numerous as the stars,' while at Iserstadt, Germany,
'bright streaks and flashes' were seen even though day had already
broken."(3)

As we
know, spectacular meteor showers are not everyday happenings. The
largest ones can more or less be predicted and measured every
thirty-odd years, thus the flurry of popular interest when celestials
align. November is usually the time of year for watching.

We
are so sophisticated now we do not fear that the sky is falling. We
can share the Spencers' childish rapture at nature's dazzling cosmic
display. You can bet they remembered it all their days and obviously
passed the story on.